Late Friday Afternoon at Brooklyn College: Tulips and Ivy

Sitting outside Whitehead Hall's library cafe around 4:30 p.m. before our class on the Brooklyn College campus, we found ourselves near these yellow and red tulips. They never had them when we were an undergrad and grad student back in 1969-75, but when we were a kid in P.S. 203 in Flatlands in Brooklyn, in late winter the teachers would take orders for seeds and especially tulip bulbs. We used to plant the bulbs in our backyard. They were supposed to keep us in touch with our Dutch Nieuw Amersfoort heritage, though the teachers never told us about speculative bubbles.

Of course, the house our parents bought for $17,500 in 1958 and sold for $68,000 in 1979 went for almost $750,000 a few years ago, before the housing bubble burst. (See Flynn, Dennis O. 1983. "Sixteenth-Century Inflation from a Production Point of View." In Inflation through the Ages: Economic, Social, Psychological and Historical Aspects. Nathan Schmukler [yes, that was our beloved professor's surname] and Edward Marcus, eds. New York: Brooklyn College Press. Pp. 162, 164.)

The ivy running along the buildings on campus are also in bloom. Brooklyn College makes a good stand-in for more prestigious private schools on shows like Gossip Girl.

Sunday Afternoon in Ridgewood: 5 Dutch Days at the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House

It was a glorious afternoon, quite mild and finally sunny - a rare event in mid-November New York City. We took advantage of the clement weather to walk from Dumbo Books HQ in Williamsburg just over the border into the borough of Queens.

Our destination: the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, the oldest Dutch Colonial stone house in New York City, on Flushing Avenue near Metropolitan Avenue. It's usually closed on Sundays but was open this afternoon for the annual 5 Dutch Days celebration by the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society, whose website explains the home's significance:

Peter Stuyvesant granted the land it sits on in the mid-seventeenth century, and by 1660, Hendrick Barents Smidt occupied a small house on the site. In 1709, Paulus Vander Ende of Flatbush purchased the farm and began construction of the current house. The building was a prominent marker in the 1769 settlement of the boundary dispute between Bushwick in Kings County and Newtown in Queens County.

During the 1820's, Adrian Onderdonk erected a small frame addition to the stone house immediately above the remnants of the foundation of the 1660 building. Its architectural features are typical of Dutch buildings in this period: a gambrel roof, Dutch doors, central hallway and double hung windows with shutters.

The Greater Ridgewood Historical Society was established in 1975 by a group of local residents to prevent the demolition of the Vander Ende Onderdonk House. From 1975 until 1981, the GRHS raised funds to reconstruct the house which had been seriously damaged by fire, and in 1976, published a history of the greater Ridgewood area, entitled Our Community, Its History and People.

In 1977, the House and property were listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1978, granted the same status on the New York State Register. The House was given New York City landmark status in June of 1996. With the help of Federal, State and local funds, the Onderdonk House was opened to the public in 1982.

The House serves as a museum for a permanent exhibit on the archaeology of the Onderdonk site, as well as changing exhibits relating to history, the arts and culture. The Society also maintains a history and genealogical research library, and offers many cultural events annually, including: guided house tours, history lectures and programs, genealogy workshops, craft classes and special events, such as St. Nicholas Day and other Dutch celebrations. The history and location of the house provide a rich educational and cultural experience for visitors.

A man wearing a Dutch colonial hat in front of the house turned out to be Arthur Kirmss, an artist and musician who serves as historic interpreter and curator of exhibits. Since we were the first person to arrive, he and his wife Evelyn gave us what amounted to a private tour of the house, or at least the parts that are open to the public.

Some of it, like the downstairs, are closed off right now. We heard a lot of fascinating details about the house and the area from colonial times through the 19th century. Arthur's knowledge about the architecture and crafts of the house, and about the families who lived there, is encyclopedic. Later on, a few more people came to see the house, and he turned us over to Evelyn, who explained how they got involved in Greater Ridgewood Historical Society and its work in restoring the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House.

We looked at the 5 Dutch Days exhibit they curated: a salute to the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange-Nassau (pronounced Nass-OW), from its founding by William the Silent, who revolted against Spanish rule of the Netherlands, to his down-to-earth 20th and 21st-century descendants, like the three most recent monarchs: Queen Wilhemina, who reigned from 1898 (her mother was regent for the prior decade) to 1948; Queen Juliana, who reigned from 1948 to 1980,

and currently reigning Queen Beatrix.

We were really impressed by the care with which the rooms and structure of the Vander Ende-Onderdonk house has been restored. Frankly, we'd only heard of it a few years ago, but it's well worth a visit, even a long walk from Williamsburg.

But as it was gettng dark when we left, we got the Q54 bus by the mammoth Western Beef supermarket and were home in no time. We're grateful to the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society for their terrific work.

Sunday Afternoon in Marine Park: Open House New York at the Hendrik I. Lott House

Alerted by a post on the always-interesting Marine Parker blog, we headed this afternoon to near where we grew up and lived for over 20 years. We wanted to see the historic Hendrik I. Lott House, which is still being restored but which was open to the public today for Open House New York, the weekend that is America’s largest architecture and design event, offering admission to some of New York’s most coveted sites that are usually closed to the public.

On a weekend when most subway lines are messed up due to service work, we made our way past the crowds at the Lorimer Street station, where people were getting off and on the shuttle buses to Myrtle/Wyckoff and all stops in between, and had a fast trip to Marine Park with the G train to Fulton Street, the Q train to Kings Highway, and the B-100 bus to Fillmore Avenue near East 36th Street.

One of our close friends (we had lunch with him just on Thursday) from Brooklyn College lived with his family just up the block from the Lott House, but we have no memories of it, though we've got a vague recollection that two elderly women lived in the house that was turned the wrong way, not facing the street but at an almost 90-degree angle to it.

We didn't think much of it, either because we were either too stoned when we'd be hanging out on the block in the early 1970s or because we lived just half a block from Mill Lane between East 55th and East 56th Street which also had houses not facing the street and didn't think this was that unusual. We did know these kinds of houses were usually old, before the current street grid.

Although we didn't know it in the 1970s, the two old ladies who lived there were descendants of the Lott family, who originally owned much of the property now in the Marine Park neighborhood. In fact, they were great-great-great-great-granddaughters of Johannes Lott, a member of the New York Colonial Assembly, who purchased land in then-rural area of Flatlands in 1719 to be used for farming.

According to Wikipedia,

Lott expanded the family holdings from Kings Highway south to Jamaica Bay and "Lott's Landing." On this property, Johannes built his homestead just east of the present house. Johannes died in 1775, leaving the farm to Johannes Jr., who occupied the property until 1792.

The Lott family quickly became leaders in the area. When Hendrick I. Lott married Mary Brownjohn in 1792, he found his grandfather’s house too small, too old, and too outmoded for an established member of a prominent family. Hendrick built a larger, grander house, combining Dutch architecture with that of the English, making it into a distinctly American building.

Hendrick did not abandon his grandfather’s house entirely, however; it served as the kitchen wing being moved to the eastern end of the new house.

He balanced this 1720 wing with a west wing, creating the symmetrical composition.

Although Hendrick added Federal-style dormer windows, the gambrel roof with graceful spring eaves is typical of the Dutch Colonial architectureal style. The interior features eighteen rooms organized by a center hall plan.

In the 19th-century, at its peak the Lotts’ farm included more than 200 acres (0.81 km2).

Like most large farmers in southern Kings County, the Lotts relied heavily on the labor of slaves to grow the crops that they sold in the markets of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

However, the Lotts freed their slaves by 1805, long before the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827. Later, it is said, the House may have served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

By 1825 the 200-acre (0.81 km2) farm, on which the Lotts raised cabbage, potatoes, vegetables and wheat, included outbuildings, barns and a separate stone kitchen. The foundation of which, that was located between the home and the present East 36th Street, was excavated in 1998 by the Brooklyn College Archaeological Research Center.

[Two years ago we posted on Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn our account of “Disappearing Dutch Brooklyn – Where Have All the Houses Gone?” -- a presentation at the Lefferts Homestead by anthropologist and archaeologist Christopher Ricciardi, who showed slides from the dig.]

For two centuries descendants of the Lotts lived in the homestead and used the land for farming. The last farmer, John Bennett Lott, died in 1923. The majority of the land was sold, leaving only three-quarters of an acre surrounding the house.

The last Lott descendant to live there, Ella Suydam, a great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Johannes Lott, lived in the house until she died in 1989.

The Hendrick I. Lott House, which sits on its original location on three-quarters of an acre of land, and its grounds are currently closed for restoration.

Well, not today from noon to 4 p.m. We got there a little before 3 p.m. and spoke to some of the neighborhood folks involved in the restoration and took the pics here of the house and grounds, which will eventually be a park. They dressed it up nicely for Halloween.

We read all the information on the signs inside and looked at the amazingly well-preserved house and its artifacts.

The house was bought by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation in 2001 and operated by the Hendrick I. Lott House Preservation Association, and is a member of the Historic House Trust.

The restoration of the Lott House is a joint effort of the City of New York/Parks & Recreation, Historic House Trust of New York City, Marine Park Civic Association, and Hendrick I. Lott House Preservation Association.

We're really grateful to all of them for the project, which can use your help, and to their participation in Open House New York.

After saying our goodbyes, we headed back to Fillmore Avenue but decided that rather than go back to Kings Highway on the B-100 bus, we'd walk toward Flatbush Avenue (and our old block) on Fillmore Avenue, which had this non-historic house with more contemporary Halloween decorations out front.

It was a beautiful, not-too-cool, bright and cloudless autumn afternoon. We caught the Q-35 bus south of the Floridian Diner, by the now-shuttered old gas station (Amoco, we think) where we used to fill up the tanks of our mom's '70 Pontiac Custom S and our own '73 Mercury Comet and took it to the last stop by the Junction.

On our way to the 2 train, a lady with a West Indian accent asked us if we knew where Lord's Bakery was.

We pointed her in the right direction up Nostrand Avenue but didn't tell her that Lord's Bakery cookies were probably why we weighed more in the early 1970s in our early twenties than we do know.

Of course we stopped getting the munchies about 30 years ago. Still, when we got back to Williamsburg, we did get a slice of marinara pizza at Sal's on Lorimer and Devoe.

Sunday at the Lefferts Homestead: "Disappearing Dutch Brooklyn"

This post appeared on Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Monday, November 19, 2007:

I have a blog post reporting on yesterday's presentation at the Lefferts Historic House running today at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn:

Sunday was the last day of "5 Dutch Days, 5 Boroughs" – the annual celebration of Dutch culture in New York City. The day's events included a morning service at the Old First Reformed Church on Carroll Street and Seventh Avenue as done in its congregation 300 years ago, using the Netherlands Liturgy of 1619, and an afternoon family exhibit at the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House in Ridgewood to show kids what life was like for young people in the early years of the city.

Four centuries ago, of course, Brooklyn was part of the great Dutch commercial world empire, but traces of Dutch Brooklyn have all but vanished in my lifetime along with the dirt roads like Mill Lane I used to walk and the wooden planks that preceded sidewalks in my little corner of what had been Nieuw Amersfoort.

When I was born, about 70 Dutch-American farmhouses stood in Brooklyn. Today only 14 are left.

On Sunday afternoon, I was at the Lefferts Homestead for "Disappearing Dutch Brooklyn – Where Have All the Houses Gone?" -- a presentation by anthropologist and archaeologist Christopher Ricciardi, who showed slides from his dig at an old house I know well, the Hendrick I. Lott House on East 36th Street, down the block from my friend Ken Falk's house in Marine Park not far from where I grew up.

Living in this Dutch Colonial farmhouse from 1720 until 1989, members of the prominent Lott family participated in the Revolutionary War, supported abolition – freeing their slaves as early as 1801 and then hiring them as paid servants – and may have later used the house as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In 2001 Ricciardi and his colleagues from the Brooklyn College Archaeological Research Center discovered the slave quarters, a windowless, cramped garret room roughly ten feet square. A tiny space – a closet within a closet, its door hidden behind coat hooks that would have held a curtain of garments – may have been a way station for escaping slaves.

Ricciardi acknowledged that just as many 18th century houses claim that George Washington slept there, most pre-Civil War houses in the North claim to be a stop on the Underground Railroad.

But two different descendants of the Lott family, who didn't know each other, both remembered the same story when given tours of the old homestead. "They said this was where they kept their runaway slaves," Ricciardi said.

Although southern Brooklyn Dutch farmers were quite wealthy, Ricciardi noted, apparently they were not materialists like their equally rich counterparts in Manhattan and what is today brownstone Brooklyn, who had more opulent homes.

The dig proved that the Lotts lived frugally, with plain dishes, glasses and pipes and no fancy materials in the construction of their house.

The Lott House is one of four Brooklyn sites owned by the Historic House Trust of New York City, along with the Lefferts Historic House Museum (c. 1783), the Old Stone House (1699), and the oldest structure in New York City, one I can recall my first girlfriend's mother, an East Flatbush community planning board member, fighting to save in the late 1960s: the original portion of the Pieter Classen Wyckoff House on Clarendon Road and East 58th Street, which dates from 1652.
The Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum now looks a lot better than the old dump with a caved-in roof sporting a crooked TV antenna I remember from that day in August 1970, when Mayor Lindsay presided over a ceremony marking the start of its restoration.

In a fascinating Q&A session following his presentation, Chris Ricciardi said that it's hard to get New Yorkers interested in southern Brooklyn's old Dutch farmhouses because they're a bit out of the way. But, he concluded, it's important to respect our borough's past and preserve our common heritage.